Today I posted this message on Facebook;

I grew up in and around Churches. Most of my early adult life involved participating in, playing music for and serving the people of church. Then, after becoming increasingly unable to cope with narrow factional forms of faith, I left, albeit for at least a decade to become part of a small community of faith.

At present, I do not attend ‘church’. I can have a long conversation with you about why this is, but many of my friends are in just the same position.

For most of us this is not about the loss of faith – it might be that the way we think about this faith has changed and traditional forms of church no longer felt relevant. That is certainly not intended as a criticism of Church. We still need those who travel in the big old religious ships, even if many of us want to get into small boats.

Through the work of people like Steve Aisthorpe, we now know that we ‘church leavers’ form the majority of the people of faith in the UK. You might even say that these people ARE the church now. The old insitiutions have been and are continuing to be, hollowed out.

If this is true – if the church is now scattered, not gathered – what sort of support might people need? How do we collectivise? How do we teach? How do we debate? What the word ‘Christian’ still mean and do any of these things still matter in a world of global warming and mass extinction?

If this is of interest to you – and if you too are a church leaver, then you might like to add your voice to some research being undertaken by Katie Cross at Aberdeen University. You can join on on this link.

I wanted to reflect on this a little more. I have posted previously about Steve Aisthorpe’s research into this area, no least this book

Or you can listen to a very good podcast with Steve talking about his research here.

We very much need people like Steve and Katie to enquire and research in this area, but more than this, it seems to me that we have to start thinking about ‘church’ in a different way. After all, we have tried for years to revive the old forms of Church. There have always been isolated success stories, but we know that the general pattern has been towards a decline in Church attendence for generations now across the Western world. I think responses to this decline within the insitituion of Church have led to attempts at innovation for a long time. I have been involved in some of them myself even.

The marketing approach

There have been a succession of attempts to get church to be more ‘seeker-friendly’, as if all we needed to do was to sell religion better. We had to have snappy answers to all the questions, sing modern soft-rock worship songs, serve coffee and doughnuts after the services etc etc. Alongisde this, we had an interest in ‘friendship evangelism’ (which always seemed a bit bait-and-switch to me) and dozens of versions of The Alpha course. This might actually work in some individual places, for a while at least, but the overall decline continues.

The embittered remnant

There are many small religious Churches, particularly those on the evangelical/pentecostal wings of the church, who see the decline as evidence of a sinful, permissive society. The fact that so few remain strengthens an idea of an eclusive elite who are waiting for the second coming of Christ, or the Great Tribulation (depending on the paricular interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) These communities see little or no growth, and decline as old stalwarts move on to glory.

The innovators

I feel most connected to those (including many of my friends) who are still trying to put new wine into the old wineskins. They are running messy church, forest church, alternative worship services, meditation groups, book groups, podcasts, art events, poetry circles and on and on. Many of them are also concerned about social justice, so others are running food banks or meal clubs, or addiction cafes, or mother and toddler groups. These people are the heart of much goodness in the middle of our communities. These people may well not be concerned with growing the numbers of Sunday attendees, but without a willing workforce, how can all this fantastic community activism continue? Who will champion the causes of the underclass, if not the Church?

The community makers

I have also travelled these roads. In leaving big Church, we started to do small church. We met around the table, we set up community events in the woods, in village halls. We did music, art and became Greenbelt Festival contributors. Our community lasted ten years, before it was time to stop, and this is the problem. Most groups like ours are ephemeral. They start well, usually led by pioneer types who bore easily, but what starts fresh soon feels stale. Organisation, holding together difference, staying focussed on things that matter- these things are not easy. Most groups like this have a shelf life, and after being in one, it can be hard to commit to starting all over again.

The wandering pilgrim

Those of us who have trod some or all of the roads above, but have found ourselves no longer part of any organised group can often feel alone. We still have friendship networks, podcasts, books. We may even be occassional attenders of religious services, but experience has made us wary of joining, for all sort of good and perhaps some bad reasons. Our theology shifts and finds new shapes because doctrinal conformity seems frankly ridiculous when the boundaries of faith are no longer policed by spiritual power brokers. Perhaps the new light we find is delusional, or perhaps we are in error, but increasingly we start to form the idea that what matters is not what you beleive but rather how we live our lives; what meaning we are inspired by and how we might move towards better.

The problem is that we are still alone. We form no salvation armies, open no food banks, make no converts,

But we are not going back.

I am often uncomfortable with the label ‘Christian’; It chafes, like a set of someone else’s clothes. I rarely apply it to myself, and when others, perhaps in response to reading one of my poems ask me directly, I usually prevaricate, wanting to narrow the descriptive field. The interesting thing though is that I do not say no.

If I am one of those wandering pilgrims I described above, it is because I am still looking for meaning – not ‘answers’ but meaning. I sill hope that light will get in through the cracks and have noticed that, for this particular pilgrim at least, this light is a particular shade of brightness when Jesus is involved with all that is beautiful and all that is broken.

In the wider sense, I find myself giving voice to something that sounds like it might have been uttered by those embittered remnants. We are living in a society that has lost its moral compass. Perhaps it never had one, but without religion, how do we unleash ideas of goodness? How do we commission people towards acts of grace? How do we measure our sectarian politics and find it wanting, thereby imagining something better? I make no claims as to the exclusivity of religious ideas to achieve these things, but we have to acknowledge that it has done so in the past… (whilst also remembering all those not-so-good aspects of the institutional religion that got in bed with empire.)

So, this question remains;

If this is true – if the church is now scattered, not gathered – what sort of support might people need? How do we collectivise? How do we teach? How do we debate? What the word ‘Christian’ still mean and do any of these things still matter in a world of global warming and mass extinction?